True for PCs, but not for phones. One of the big complaints about AT&T regarding the iPhone is that while AT&T has the "fastest 3G network" many of their remote towers are connected to the internet with a couple of T1's, and don't have enough bandwidth to provide a satisfactory browsing experience to a few hundred iPhone users.
Google is probably looking at partnering much more closely with Verizon than you realize. VZ has thousands of CO facilities all over the country that are essentially empty -- the footprint of equipment needed to provide landline services is shrinking dramatically. Plus the wireless side has the best site placement of any of the carriers, and the backhaul internet connectivity for many of the cell towers runs through these COs.
Throw some Google clusters in these facilities... and you have an ability to deliver extremely fast application access without traversing the internet or having to increase bandwidth to the thousands of wireless sites.
I'd love to be able to actually deploy and maintain Firefox in the large enterprise that I work in. Users want it. Unfortunately, users don't have admin rights, and Mozilla makes applying updates and configuring the browser from a central location difficult and has a history of not thinking about and actively shooting down any proposals which would potentially benefit system administrators trying to support Firefox.
Totalitarian governments breed corruption, because the only way for folks to get resources or attention from the government is to influence the dictator or some government functionary. Democracies become more corrupt as they become more dictatorial.
Without pesky "electoral circuses" and a free press, nobody ever asks those inconvenient questions that bring down politicians.
You're smoking crack. Chinese banks are actually worse than many US banks. And once they make enough, the Chinese people are buying lots of cars and HDTVs.
Old electronics are generally worthless, and nonprofits are ill-equipped to dispose of them properly. Take them to a legit electronics recycler to keep them out of the landfill (best case) or out of some illegal dump in the 3rd world where some poor wretch is smelting plastic to harvest the copper.
The only time IT reporting to the CFO makes sense is where the company's IT needs are very tightly definable. An HVAC company doesn't need extensive IT, and the CFO is generally a cheapskate who will keep the costs down.
Most orgs need IT to be operations-facing. IMO, it should report to an operations executive or a dedicated "CIO" type if the company is large or relies heavily on technology.
Many high-end printers have pretty intense manpower requirements. One we purchased a few years ago contractually required you to have certified operators, as well as a resident vendor engineer at least 2-3 days/week.
I think the open and obvious manipulation of scientific data to market and sell products is what has empowered the modern evangelical idiocy in the United States. If you want to see the credibility of science rendered impotent, read some patent drug marketing materials. Another great example is baby rearing advice. Compare the scientifically derived advice given by doctors for infant care today. Then talk to someone with a 10 year old. Then talk to your mom.
Reality has a nasty habit of ruining plans. Amazon.com suffered an outage a few weeks ago due to a car accident that interrupted street power. An implementation error for the system that switched over to the alternate power source basically shut the data center down.
Does that mean that Amazon data center IT doesn't understand "concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery"? No, clearly it doesn't. It means that someone screwed up some aspect of the installation of the power system.
I've been burnt by things like this in the past. My employer spent millions on a super-redundant, high-performance, high-availability storage solution -- which failed when a vendor technician replaced a bad disk. (a problem that should never happen) We tested that procedure dozens of times, tested back-out strategies, and still ended up stymied by a firmware error made by some faceless engineer somewhere.
I don't know the details of what happened enough to condemn BP for the failure. The company previously had a good safety record, and I presume that the crew on the rig wouldn't make a decision that ran a risk of killing some/all of them. (Which it did)
Mozilla is dumb. I can have Hawaiian flower patterns, but I cannot control when patches are released in my enterprise.
Most idiotic Slashot story ever.
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The Apple 2 wasn't an open source device. Yes, you could hack together peripherals and write stuff in basic.
But other than that, there isn't some big philosophical shift in Apple's model in 1983 and today. In 2010 you need to use the app store to distribute stuff. In 1983 you have to buy dev tools and get retail shelf space. In 2010 you have DRM. In 1983 the computers weren't good enough to use DRM, so you had to use code wheels, lookup the word on page 161, line 6, word 12 in the manual and hard to photocopy code sheets. (Remember Sim City 1?)
Facebook is more than willing to violate your privacy and share your information and social networks with advertisers, yet they stonewall a criminal investigation. They certainly deserve whatever negative publicity they receive relating to this matter.
You should be very happy with the status quo. The bottom tier of people pay a negative tax, the middle class pays something in the middle, and the wealthy pay alot of taxes. Most of the "tax loopholes" that people bitch about are things like government debt, which is tax-free, and various investment vehicles.
The people who talk about "flat" taxes and the "fair" tax generally get politely ignored, because the biggest beneficiaries of tax deductions are the middle class, who get exemptions for children, deduct mortgage interest and property taxes.
The republicans and democrats are very similar, differing only in very subtle ways.
Your statement isn't looking deeper at the issue. People in positions of power unfortunately need to lie to others sometimes, it's just a requirement of the job. If you are in charge of a serious group of people on a daily basis, you have to deal with a variety of things that demand secrecy/discretion, which in turn demands that you occasionally lie about things to others. In my opinion, reducing the impact of lying is a defensive tool that our brains are wired with.
What happens when an employee is accused of a crime or career-ending misconduct? Serious accusations must be investigated, but are often completely untrue... so you are going to be forced to lie to others point-blank if they hear rumors and ask you about it. Otherwise the rumor machine kicks in.
What happens when the company is in trouble and you need to seriously evaluate all sorts of different options, including laying off most of the staff? Again, you have to be careful to keep those sorts of discussions close to the vest, and that may require lying.
Studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrate that in certain contexts, otherwise normal people will become monsters capable of incredible evil. This is true, but it doesn't mean that we all need to curl up in the fetal position and cry. You have to have controls -- checks and balances to ensure that the powerful don't turn tyrannical. Those checks include training, delegated authority, evaluation with consequences and debriefings. Disasters like Enron, the My Lai massacre, and countless others are egregious examples of what happens when individuals invested with unchecked power are unleashed.
No, but many vendors will roll additional equipment into existing service contracts if you buy their FRUs. The cost of accounting for third-party parts usually exceeds any savings when you buy in bulk.
Because the states control the disbursement of education funding, and the teacher's unions control the state legislatures. If you threw more money at schools, you'd see more ridiculous and expensive initiatives like handing out computers and iPods to every student and very little substance. The unions fought long and hard for very generous employment terms and the current status quo, and will not give them up easily.
That level of formality usually applies to large-scale purchases that involve technical and financial evaluation. (ie. If you put out an RFP for an ERP system.) Usually there is a dollar threshold under which you can purchase things from state commodity contracts or GSA contracts, etc.
If you were buying a commodity product like memory, specifying "Brand X" would generally not be acceptable. The justification would come in if you have a "Brand X" server, and for warranty reasons, buying "Brand X" memory was a requirement. Software isn't classified as a commodity like memory. You may have multiple resellers for Windows licenses, but there isn't a category "Software - Operating System" that puts Red Hat, Solaris and Windows up as equivalent products.
IMO, that's a good thing. Would you take the same position if you needed to buy Red Hat support agreements to expand your existing MySQL database cluster, and some procurement rule forced a competitive bid between Red Hat, Solaris & Windows?
State procurement laws don't prescribe the degree of openness or standardization within the government. They establish rules to ensure that procurements are handled appropriately. Its very common for technical requirements to specify that an application work with Windows, Internet Explorer, Oracle,.Net, Tomcat Java Server, etc.
I pushed to get Firefox tested within the large organization that I work in. It was an abject failure. While Firefox is free to download, Mozilla doesn't care about enterprise IT shops and makes it impossible to support the browser in a cost-effective manner. We support hundreds of applications and dozens of business critical applications with browser interfaces. We need to have a robust testing process before we can upgrade code, and Firefox makes that really difficult. Browser add-ons routinely break, it's difficult to manage user profile settings, and if you disable auto-updates you need to manually package patches for distribution.
IE is hardly perfect, but we can test and distribute patches easily, use group policy to configure browser settings to provide a good user experience and had fewer complaints about add-ons with 50,000 users than we did with 300 Firefox pilot users.
At the end of the day, we have 4 folks managing desktops for 50,000 people, and they have more compelling things to do than futz around with Firefox. A small government agency with a few hundred staff with have 2 IT folks, a supervisor and maybe a couple of interns. For them, the Microsoft "stack" is unfortunately the only viable way to deliver the IT services that they need.
Entering into an enterprise agreement requires that all computers within an organization count as a "seat" in the contract for any products covered by the agreement. You get a substantial discount for taking this approach, and are able to spread licensing payments over 3 years without interest. The only exceptions are servers, kiosks, atms, etc.
DDT was banned after it was discovered that it had moved through the food chain with devastating effect. For example, birds of prey were essentially wiped out by the use of DDT. It also behaves in an estrogenic manner and can trigger hormone response in some situations, (ie. fetal development and miscarriage) and may be a carcinogen.
Is spraying DDT in the US worth the potential human and demonstrated risk to animals? In my opinion, no. Is spraying DDT in sub-saharan Africa where the probability of getting malaria or some other tropical disease worth it? Maybe -- but mosquito nets may be a better overall investment for the folks living there.
In addition to the environmental factors, poor people tend to have bad habits and living conditions that lend themselves to health problems. They are more likely to smoke, more likely to have an alcohol problem, less likely to be well educated, less likely to eat fresh food. At work, they are more likely to do shift work, and swing/night shift workers tend to be less healthy and more accident prone than average. When you can't pay the bills, you get stressed out; stress is bad for your health.
Poor folks are also less likely to have health insurance, and are also less likely to take advantage of preventative care follow a doctors instructions or interact with medical providers in a productive way. I worked for a place with a substantial workforce that had great insurance for medical/dental/vision with $2 co-pays, but internal surveys indicated that the average hourly employee didn't have a primary care provider and hadn't seen a dentist in two years or more.
You forgot about the real killer that is lurking in every home in the United States: dihydrogen monoxide. Dihydrogen monoxide is used in all sorts of industrial processes and is associated with thousands of deaths each year, it a is a major component of acid rain, has been linked to school shootings, and can be found in our rivers and streams.
Likewise, I still use Netscape Navigator 2, because these uppity websites keep throwing these images at me, and newfangled browsers don't let you refuse images. If I want to look at pretty pictures, I'll take out my photo albums!
Slashdot Mirror
True for PCs, but not for phones. One of the big complaints about AT&T regarding the iPhone is that while AT&T has the "fastest 3G network" many of their remote towers are connected to the internet with a couple of T1's, and don't have enough bandwidth to provide a satisfactory browsing experience to a few hundred iPhone users.
Google is probably looking at partnering much more closely with Verizon than you realize. VZ has thousands of CO facilities all over the country that are essentially empty -- the footprint of equipment needed to provide landline services is shrinking dramatically. Plus the wireless side has the best site placement of any of the carriers, and the backhaul internet connectivity for many of the cell towers runs through these COs.
Throw some Google clusters in these facilities... and you have an ability to deliver extremely fast application access without traversing the internet or having to increase bandwidth to the thousands of wireless sites.
I'd love to be able to actually deploy and maintain Firefox in the large enterprise that I work in. Users want it. Unfortunately, users don't have admin rights, and Mozilla makes applying updates and configuring the browser from a central location difficult and has a history of not thinking about and actively shooting down any proposals which would potentially benefit system administrators trying to support Firefox.
I don't get why they don't get it.
Totalitarian governments breed corruption, because the only way for folks to get resources or attention from the government is to influence the dictator or some government functionary. Democracies become more corrupt as they become more dictatorial.
Without pesky "electoral circuses" and a free press, nobody ever asks those inconvenient questions that bring down politicians.
You're smoking crack. Chinese banks are actually worse than many US banks. And once they make enough, the Chinese people are buying lots of cars and HDTVs.
Old electronics are generally worthless, and nonprofits are ill-equipped to dispose of them properly. Take them to a legit electronics recycler to keep them out of the landfill (best case) or out of some illegal dump in the 3rd world where some poor wretch is smelting plastic to harvest the copper.
The only time IT reporting to the CFO makes sense is where the company's IT needs are very tightly definable. An HVAC company doesn't need extensive IT, and the CFO is generally a cheapskate who will keep the costs down.
Most orgs need IT to be operations-facing. IMO, it should report to an operations executive or a dedicated "CIO" type if the company is large or relies heavily on technology.
Many high-end printers have pretty intense manpower requirements. One we purchased a few years ago contractually required you to have certified operators, as well as a resident vendor engineer at least 2-3 days/week.
I disagree.
I think the open and obvious manipulation of scientific data to market and sell products is what has empowered the modern evangelical idiocy in the United States. If you want to see the credibility of science rendered impotent, read some patent drug marketing materials. Another great example is baby rearing advice. Compare the scientifically derived advice given by doctors for infant care today. Then talk to someone with a 10 year old. Then talk to your mom.
You're confusing liability for the incident with the testimony given in congressional hearings supposedly intended to find out what happened.
Reality has a nasty habit of ruining plans. Amazon.com suffered an outage a few weeks ago due to a car accident that interrupted street power. An implementation error for the system that switched over to the alternate power source basically shut the data center down.
Does that mean that Amazon data center IT doesn't understand "concept of planning for redundancy, failover, and recovery"? No, clearly it doesn't. It means that someone screwed up some aspect of the installation of the power system.
I've been burnt by things like this in the past. My employer spent millions on a super-redundant, high-performance, high-availability storage solution -- which failed when a vendor technician replaced a bad disk. (a problem that should never happen) We tested that procedure dozens of times, tested back-out strategies, and still ended up stymied by a firmware error made by some faceless engineer somewhere.
I don't know the details of what happened enough to condemn BP for the failure. The company previously had a good safety record, and I presume that the crew on the rig wouldn't make a decision that ran a risk of killing some/all of them. (Which it did)
Mozilla is dumb. I can have Hawaiian flower patterns, but I cannot control when patches are released in my enterprise.
The Apple 2 wasn't an open source device. Yes, you could hack together peripherals and write stuff in basic.
But other than that, there isn't some big philosophical shift in Apple's model in 1983 and today. In 2010 you need to use the app store to distribute stuff. In 1983 you have to buy dev tools and get retail shelf space. In 2010 you have DRM. In 1983 the computers weren't good enough to use DRM, so you had to use code wheels, lookup the word on page 161, line 6, word 12 in the manual and hard to photocopy code sheets. (Remember Sim City 1?)
I disagree.
Facebook is more than willing to violate your privacy and share your information and social networks with advertisers, yet they stonewall a criminal investigation. They certainly deserve whatever negative publicity they receive relating to this matter.
You should be very happy with the status quo. The bottom tier of people pay a negative tax, the middle class pays something in the middle, and the wealthy pay alot of taxes. Most of the "tax loopholes" that people bitch about are things like government debt, which is tax-free, and various investment vehicles.
The people who talk about "flat" taxes and the "fair" tax generally get politely ignored, because the biggest beneficiaries of tax deductions are the middle class, who get exemptions for children, deduct mortgage interest and property taxes.
The republicans and democrats are very similar, differing only in very subtle ways.
Your statement isn't looking deeper at the issue. People in positions of power unfortunately need to lie to others sometimes, it's just a requirement of the job. If you are in charge of a serious group of people on a daily basis, you have to deal with a variety of things that demand secrecy/discretion, which in turn demands that you occasionally lie about things to others. In my opinion, reducing the impact of lying is a defensive tool that our brains are wired with.
What happens when an employee is accused of a crime or career-ending misconduct? Serious accusations must be investigated, but are often completely untrue... so you are going to be forced to lie to others point-blank if they hear rumors and ask you about it. Otherwise the rumor machine kicks in.
What happens when the company is in trouble and you need to seriously evaluate all sorts of different options, including laying off most of the staff? Again, you have to be careful to keep those sorts of discussions close to the vest, and that may require lying.
Studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrate that in certain contexts, otherwise normal people will become monsters capable of incredible evil. This is true, but it doesn't mean that we all need to curl up in the fetal position and cry. You have to have controls -- checks and balances to ensure that the powerful don't turn tyrannical. Those checks include training, delegated authority, evaluation with consequences and debriefings. Disasters like Enron, the My Lai massacre, and countless others are egregious examples of what happens when individuals invested with unchecked power are unleashed.
No, but many vendors will roll additional equipment into existing service contracts if you buy their FRUs. The cost of accounting for third-party parts usually exceeds any savings when you buy in bulk.
Because the states control the disbursement of education funding, and the teacher's unions control the state legislatures. If you threw more money at schools, you'd see more ridiculous and expensive initiatives like handing out computers and iPods to every student and very little substance. The unions fought long and hard for very generous employment terms and the current status quo, and will not give them up easily.
That level of formality usually applies to large-scale purchases that involve technical and financial evaluation. (ie. If you put out an RFP for an ERP system.) Usually there is a dollar threshold under which you can purchase things from state commodity contracts or GSA contracts, etc.
If you were buying a commodity product like memory, specifying "Brand X" would generally not be acceptable. The justification would come in if you have a "Brand X" server, and for warranty reasons, buying "Brand X" memory was a requirement. Software isn't classified as a commodity like memory. You may have multiple resellers for Windows licenses, but there isn't a category "Software - Operating System" that puts Red Hat, Solaris and Windows up as equivalent products.
IMO, that's a good thing. Would you take the same position if you needed to buy Red Hat support agreements to expand your existing MySQL database cluster, and some procurement rule forced a competitive bid between Red Hat, Solaris & Windows?
State procurement laws don't prescribe the degree of openness or standardization within the government. They establish rules to ensure that procurements are handled appropriately. Its very common for technical requirements to specify that an application work with Windows, Internet Explorer, Oracle, .Net, Tomcat Java Server, etc.
I pushed to get Firefox tested within the large organization that I work in. It was an abject failure. While Firefox is free to download, Mozilla doesn't care about enterprise IT shops and makes it impossible to support the browser in a cost-effective manner. We support hundreds of applications and dozens of business critical applications with browser interfaces. We need to have a robust testing process before we can upgrade code, and Firefox makes that really difficult. Browser add-ons routinely break, it's difficult to manage user profile settings, and if you disable auto-updates you need to manually package patches for distribution.
IE is hardly perfect, but we can test and distribute patches easily, use group policy to configure browser settings to provide a good user experience and had fewer complaints about add-ons with 50,000 users than we did with 300 Firefox pilot users.
At the end of the day, we have 4 folks managing desktops for 50,000 people, and they have more compelling things to do than futz around with Firefox. A small government agency with a few hundred staff with have 2 IT folks, a supervisor and maybe a couple of interns. For them, the Microsoft "stack" is unfortunately the only viable way to deliver the IT services that they need.
Not true.
Entering into an enterprise agreement requires that all computers within an organization count as a "seat" in the contract for any products covered by the agreement. You get a substantial discount for taking this approach, and are able to spread licensing payments over 3 years without interest. The only exceptions are servers, kiosks, atms, etc.
DDT was banned after it was discovered that it had moved through the food chain with devastating effect. For example, birds of prey were essentially wiped out by the use of DDT. It also behaves in an estrogenic manner and can trigger hormone response in some situations, (ie. fetal development and miscarriage) and may be a carcinogen.
Is spraying DDT in the US worth the potential human and demonstrated risk to animals? In my opinion, no. Is spraying DDT in sub-saharan Africa where the probability of getting malaria or some other tropical disease worth it? Maybe -- but mosquito nets may be a better overall investment for the folks living there.
In addition to the environmental factors, poor people tend to have bad habits and living conditions that lend themselves to health problems. They are more likely to smoke, more likely to have an alcohol problem, less likely to be well educated, less likely to eat fresh food. At work, they are more likely to do shift work, and swing/night shift workers tend to be less healthy and more accident prone than average. When you can't pay the bills, you get stressed out; stress is bad for your health.
Poor folks are also less likely to have health insurance, and are also less likely to take advantage of preventative care follow a doctors instructions or interact with medical providers in a productive way. I worked for a place with a substantial workforce that had great insurance for medical/dental/vision with $2 co-pays, but internal surveys indicated that the average hourly employee didn't have a primary care provider and hadn't seen a dentist in two years or more.
You forgot about the real killer that is lurking in every home in the United States: dihydrogen monoxide. Dihydrogen monoxide is used in all sorts of industrial processes and is associated with thousands of deaths each year, it a is a major component of acid rain, has been linked to school shootings, and can be found in our rivers and streams.
Likewise, I still use Netscape Navigator 2, because these uppity websites keep throwing these images at me, and newfangled browsers don't let you refuse images. If I want to look at pretty pictures, I'll take out my photo albums!